The Slow Way: On Becoming What We Love, A Series

If we want to transform our lives, if we want our faith to flow into every aspect—our work, our community, and our family life—we need to attend to what we love.

for the frantic strivers, serial doers, and weary achievers

As I write this, I’m preparing to take 16 teenagers to a not-quite-big-enough Airbnb over the weekend for our fall retreat. We will spread air mattresses throughout the house, and the weather is looking perfect for an early fall Saturday on the lake: kayaks, hikes, fire pit. The reason I know that I’m still doing exactly what I’m called to be doing is that even after spending a couple of hours packing my minivan with the results of an incredible Costco run, I’m still excited. It’s going to be fun. What a gift when fun and good can combine in life.

As is the case with many of us who find ourselves post-evangelicalism, ministry to teenagers has required me to re-narrate my own story of faith in order to communicate what it looks like to have a spiritual life that is whole and healthy. In some ways I’m not teaching what I was taught. Instead I’m exploring Christian faith from the other side, considering what shaped me to love the person of Jesus, and what harmed my sense of joy, goodness, and purpose. I am considering what I want to pass on to the teenagers in my life, and what I want to protect them from when it comes to understanding and experiencing the divine.

There are foundational elements of guiding teenagers into faith that feel deeply important. I want them to be formed outside of shame. I want them to discover a love for God that runs deeper than shallow notions of good and bad. I want them to find in the Person of Jesus an invitation to love their neighbor and themselves. I want them to see the gifts they carry inside them as something the world needs, that they might live their particular lives as a response to the deep and transformative love of God. 

The spiritual practices that I internalized as a teenager are still foundational to my faith. At the same time, much of the ways I was taught to engage in prayer or worship in my youth were often guilt-ridden and shame-based. For twenty years I’ve been trying to unravel the healthy parts of my faith from the scarcity. What parts of my faith are all wound up in the fear of God’s disapproval or anger? What parts of my faith have tapped into the truth of who I was made to be, my true self? 

I long to invite the teenagers in my life to spiritual formation based in God’s generosity, the example of Jesus, and the vibrant life of Holy Spirit. 

So how do we teach young people to develop a regular practice of prayer, sacred reading, service, and joyful giving without relying on notions of shame, without laying on burdens or expectations that feel too heavy to sustain? When spirituality is wrapped up in rules it either strangles the people willing to follow the rules, or it pushes away the ones who don’t want to be tied down. Either way, it fails us. 

I think this is why Jesus never gave lists of what to do. He told stories instead. He invited his followers to see themselves in parables about seeds and siblings, coins and sheep. If Jesus is our example, then our role as spiritual guides is to lead with a light touch, to tell compelling stories, to live a beautiful example, to invite the ones in our care to the kind of life they imagine. 

And so, as I come to this weekend, I hope to introduce the goodness of spiritual practices by engaging my students’ imaginations and tapping into the values they already hold. One way we’re going to do this is by introducing the idea of a “rule of life,” the intentional habits that guide us into physical, spiritual, and emotional health.

A rule of life is an ancient idea that goes back to the earliest monastics, the desert mothers and fathers who left what they saw as corrupt religious culture in order to reform and prioritize their faith in a way that felt authentic. They were intentional about how they lived together, and they made vows that would allow them to prioritize the most vital parts of their faith. A rule of life generally looks at six areas: Soul, Mind, Body, Vocation, Family, and Community. As we build consistent habits of faith in these aspects of our lives, we begin to become the people we want to be, the people God dreams of us becoming. 

How is teaching a rule of life different from teaching young people to read their Bibles or pray regularly? When we offer one another a vision of the good life, a life where faith stretches itself into the physical, vocational, and communal areas of our lives, we are offering a holistic vision of life with God. We’re demonstrating to young people that how we live out our faith in our vocations and community is just as important as the personal time of prayer we commit to.

I think this is vital when we’re talking about it means to invite young people to a wholehearted faith. Some of the disordered notions I’ve needed to shake off in my understanding of God came from a heavy emphasis being placed on my soul, while little to no emphasis was placed on how I was treating my body, or how I was invited to live my faith vocationally (outside of spiritually-approved jobs in ministry). To offer young people an understanding of faith that weaves through their experience of community, their experience of education, their experience of friendship? That’s where a healthy spirituality grows. 

I find James K. Smith’s book You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit super helpful to this conversation: Smith’s premise is that we become what we love. We don’t grow our spiritual lives from the top-down, using brain-power to force ourselves into transformation. Our prayer-lives don’t become healthy by way of guilt or even belief. He proposes that “love is the condition for knowledge. It’s not that I know in order to love, but rather: I love in order to know.” In other words, if we want to transform our lives, if we want our faith to flow into every aspect—our work, our community, and our family life—we have to attend to what we love.

If you want to know what you love, look at what you make time for. If you want to know how your life is being shaped, pay attention to the values you’re consuming and living out. Nothing tells us what we love more than what we do with our time. We may not like what our calendars say about what we love and how we live, but how we use our time doesn’t lie to us. We live at the mercy of the expectations of our careers, the schedules of our kids’ extracurriculars, the rules of what’s expected in our communities.The way we spend our days shows us what we love. And the things we love show us what we actually value. 

How do we change what we love in order to live into our values? Smith says we do it by transforming our habits a little at a time. I think that’s where a rule of life comes in. When we create a rule of life we are building a daily plan based on both our values and the constraints of our lives. But we’re also asking the question: How am I using my time in this area of life? And what does my time say about what I love? 

Our loves have a lot more power to affect our choices than our ideas or beliefs. What we do reveals what we love. But we are people who need to start small–no guilt here, no wild commitments that aren’t feasible to the realities of our lives. Just small habits that point us toward the people we want to be. 

A Slow Practice

Creating a rule of life isn’t a one-moment task. It should be done carefully, intentionally, and with enough space, time, and consideration that you are able to follow through on the commitments you make. Today we’re not creating a rule of life, we’re simply starting the process—asking ourselves questions about what motivates us in each particular area, and giving ourselves opportunities to consider what habits we might want to change as we seek to align our loves and our beliefs. 

Take some time to consider each area of your life: Who do you want to be and what small habits can you build to grow the love of what is most important in you? 

Let’s begin by becoming aware and prayerful. 

Breathe in: Here I am.

Breathe out: Lead me in the way I should go.

If you have a journal you may want to write notes down as you go. Move through each category, asking yourself these questions:

Soul

• What are the loves in my life that make me aware of my connection with God? 

• What loves in my life distract me from that connection? 

• When I imagine a healthy soul (a healthy spiritual life) what do I imagine?

• What spiritual practices (for example prayer, meditation, scripture reading, encountering visual or musical art, rest, engagement with the natural world, service etc) feed my soul?

• What stands between my life as it now is and the healthy spiritual life I want to have?

Mind

• What receives most of my attention in a day? (Feel free to write these things down according to the various movements of your day.)

• What do I wish I were giving attention to?

• If it’s true that I give my attention to what I most love, are there problematic loves in my life? 

• If I could focus my mind on more valuable loves, what would they be?

Body

• Do I prioritize the health of my body as much as I do the health of my soul or mind? 

• Do I think of my body with disdain? Do I think or speak poorly of my body?

• Fill in the blank: If I loved my body as God loves me, I would _______. 

• Consider what loves stand in the way between my desire to care for my physical needs (listening to my pain and responding to my body in a compassionate way, seeking healthy movement, feeding myself well, getting enough sleep) and how I actually treat my body.

Vocation

• Do I find moments of joy in my work day, either connected to the gifts I’m offering the world, or connected to the people I encounter?

• Do I experience fulfillment in my work? What would need to change in order to experience satisfaction?

• What does my work ethic show me about what I love? 

• What do I wish my work ethnic looked like?

Family 

• Who do I consider my family? (Some of you are raising kids, some live long distance from your grown children, some are not partnered or are far from immediate family but may have “chosen family” in your local community.) Consider who belongs to your family and what it might look like to invest deeply in those relationships.

• Do my family interactions reflect the self-giving generosity of Jesus’s example?

• Do I prioritize moments of connection with the people I love?

• When I don’t prioritize connection, what loves are getting in the way of those relationships? What do I want to do about the loves that distract me from connection with my people? 

Community

• Do I make time for friendships that nourish my mind, soul and body? 

• If I don’t make time for friendships what loves are getting in the way of love for my community?

• Do I prioritize acts of service for my community, even though doing so takes time and effort? If I don’t, what loves are in the way of building more commitment to service? 

• What small habits can I add to my life to build more love (and therefore more time)  for the friends in my life? 

This is a list you can come back to over the course of the next week. As you recognize what you love based on your habits, consider what new habits you may want to begin building. We’ll come back to this practice next week.

A list of things:

• I’ll be continuing this series on writing a rule of life for the next few weeks! Stay tuned. :)

• Attention all you Lancaster, PA folks! I’ll be doing a reading at the adorable Nooks Bookshop in Lancaster October 12 at 7:30pm. I’d love for you to join me then! Find tickets here. 

• Other events coming up: 

  • I’ll be in Amarillo, Texas at Central Church of Christ speaking at their Faith Forum Nov. 3 on “Redefining Blessed.” 

  • I’ll be with The Lucky Few podcast for a live podcast event at the National Down Syndrome Society’s Adult Summit in Orange County, CA November 14-16!

• As always, my new book Blessed Are The Rest of Us is available wherever books are sold, but you can find at 40% off the price of other booksellers at BakerBookHouse. Just use the code SLOWWAY at checkout.